Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two…

Successful completion of a university degree is a complex matter. Based on considerations regarding the demands of acquiring a university degree, the aim of this paper was to investigate the utility of complex problem-solving (CPS) skills in the prediction of objective and subjective university success (SUS). The key finding of this study was that…

With the adoption of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) in educational institutions, a lot of data has become available describing students' online behavior. Many researchers have used these data to predict student performance. This has led to a rather diverse set of findings, possibly related to the diversity in courses and predictor variables…

Data mining is known to have a potential for predicting user performance. However, there are few studies that explore its potential for predicting student behavior in a procedural training environment. This paper presents a collective student model, which is built from past student logs. These logs are first grouped into clusters. Then, an…

The purpose of this study was to assess the merit of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal as a pre-admission criterion in conjunction with the frequently utilized admission criteria of the college prerequisite grade point average and the National League of Nursing pre-admission test. Data were collected from 192 first-year nursing…

The use and validity of the Graduate Record Examination General Test (GRE) to predict the success of graduate school applicants is heavily debated, especially for its possible impact on the selection of underrepresented minorities into science, technology, engineering, and math fields. To better identify candidates who would succeed in our program…

The Pittsburgh Promise is a scholarship program that provides $5,000 per year toward college tuition for public high school graduates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who earned a 2.5 GPA and a 90% attendance record. This study used a difference-in-difference design to assess whether the introduction of the Promise scholarship program directly…

The current study was completed through a retrospective analysis of school records of elementary school students in the Northeast Region of the Philadelphia School District (PSD) who have participated in the Fast ForWord (FFW) Language program. The data requested from student records included: demographic information (e.g., gender, grade, age,…

The paper uses the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data system (IPEDS) data to simulate the 2020 American Graduation Initiative (AGI) goal introduced by President Obama in the summer of 2009. We estimate community college graduation rates and completion numbers under different scenarios that include the following sets of variables: (a) internal…

First-year students are still failing at an alarming rate. This is an international issue that universities face and there is currently no clear indication of the cause of the problem as universities move from being elite to providing mass education. This article examines the possible correlation between students' high school performance and…

This study examined factors associated with the upward transfer of baccalaureate aspirants beginning at community colleges. Based on data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and the Postsecondary Education Transcript Study, a sequential logistic regression analysis was conducted to predict bachelor's degree-seeking community…

Numerous challenges can be associated with pursuing a degree as a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA). The risk to perspective students and their nurse anesthesia programs may be lessened if success factors for program completion and passing of the national certification examination (NCE) could be identified. The purpose of this ex post…

Enrollment in STEM majors has improved recently, but there continues to be concern over students' retention in those majors, especially women and minority students. The purpose of this study is to develop an integrated understanding of how multiple predictor variables affect student degree attainment, and to ascertain how those variables' impact…

The increasing competition for graduate students among business schools has resulted in a greater emphasis on graduate business student retention. In an effort to address this issue, the current article uses survival analysis, decision trees and TreeNet® to identify factors that can be used to identify students who are at risk of dropping out of a…

Building on Shulruf, Hattie and Tumen (2008), this work examines the capacity of various National Certificate in Educational Achievement (NCEA)-derived models to predict first-year performance in Biological Sciences at a New Zealand university. We compared three models: (1) the "best-80" indicator as used by several New Zealand…